Energy efficiency is widely viewed as the easiest, fastest, and least expensive way to satisfy the ever increasing energy demand requirements in the United States and throughout many countries in the world. Energy efficiency measures also improve bottom profit margins, help avoid power outages, and offset the need for new power sources.
In electricity grids, demand response has been used to manage customer consumption of electricity in response to supply conditions. By way of example, demand response has been used to have electricity customers reduce their consumption at critical times or in response to market prices. Demand response can involve actually curtailing power used or switching consumption from grid to the onsite generation of electricity. This is quite a different concept than energy efficiency, which refers to using less power to perform the same tasks on, for example, a continuous basis or whenever a particular task is performed. Conventional demand response schemes are implemented with large commercial customers, often through the use of dedicated control systems that shed loads in response to a request by a utility provider or market price condition.